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As the game opens, you are onboard an alien ship and are the last hope for mankind.

You have just stolen the ship from the Oceania Museum of Technology on Earth, which is under the control of the Sentinels (as is the rest of the galaxy). The Sentinels were actually built by man in the great space age of the Nu-Earth colonies to defend the galaxy. However, man soon became so dependent on them that civilisation crumbled.

Since then the Sentinels have acquired a taste for power and aren't about to let a low-life human destroy their thirty installation planets on one of their own ships.

The screen display shows the ships icon-driven controls which you can now at least understand as you've converted the ship's computers to English. Their exact use is yet to be discovered.

At your disposal you have two computers (one of which a library computer), a status report showing the strength of the ship's shields and your hit/miss ratio in graph form, a hyperspace drive, communications channel for hints and messages, a galactic map of the galaxy's 300 planets and the ability to launch up to five attack shuttles.

Your task in the game is to find the 30 Sentinel planets and destroy their installations. Unfortunately you will have to visit most of the galaxies 300 planets before you find them.

To explore a planet you despatch a shuttle to its surface where you must guide it through the planet's defences. These include a series of landscapes to be navigated and alien raids to be beaten back.

At first the aliens send evil tri-syncs who weave circular patterns before launching suicide attacks. These with practice can be beaten by picking off the end of the circle but be watchful for reinforcements a they can fly over you, catching you off guard.

As you progress further into the systems you will face the bit fighters, Microbs and the dreaded Irata's.

Unfortunately, all your fighting could be in vain, as chances are you will find nothing on the planet. But at least there's only 299 planets to go.

Luckily the game has a load and save option which you should make use of to explore planets, that you can mark off mentally. Since, if you lose some shuttles you can always re-load the game, at a previously saved stage, to recoup your losses. This may be considered cheating by some but in my mind it's merely redressing the balance.

Program Techniques have previously worked as a programming house for other companies and have just completed the Spectrum version of Pole Position. Xcel is their first game under their own name which will be available soon and in my opinion, it is "Xcel-lent".